For those curious about the history of guns, here's more about the .20 Williams Evans.
General D.K. Palit published a memoir in 2004 titled "
Musings & Memories" (we have the first volume in manuscript form) in two volumes and 650 pages in which he discusses much of his life.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Musings_Memories.html?id=SPLSMXSl8dECSome pages were devoted to people he met along the way including me and my wife. Here are excerpts from P. 597:
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"Christopher, the younger son, then three years old, used to love riding on my pommel as I hit the ball about the 61st Cavalry polo ground; and I soon became his favorite outsider. That's how close we had become to each other. On Sunday's, Patel's day off, Geneviéve even insisted on serving me at table with a cooked breakfast from her kitchen!
....."And when Gene began to accompany me on duck and partridge shoots at Aurangpur, it put a firm seal on our closeness. (Gene, as one might have expected, possessed a single-barrel "pump gun" - the hallmark of the average American sportsman! - heavy and cumbersome with its 32" barrel. So he began to use my William Evans fully-finished box-lock .20 bore (bequeathed to me by my old friend Reggie Sawhney, when he married his American second wife and migrated to the States). After a three-year stint, when the Williams' were posted back to Washington, I in turn presented the gun to Gene."Uh. excuse me General....I hit everything with that "cumbersome Remington 870." (Oh the Empire - even its remnants - and its pretentions!
...) And you gave the Williams Evans to Geneviéve, not me (ok maybe you gave it to me but she claims it, QED).
Oh well. I'll post a bit of information separately about Indian Navy Captain Reggie Sawhney which will take the story back another generation.
